Crime at Bedtime

At approximately 12 minutes past midnight on the morning of Monday the 13th of June 1994, in the leafy Los Angeles neighbourhood of Brentwood, a group of residents on South Bundy Drive were woken by the barking of a distressed Akita dog. The dog was wandering the street. It had blood on its paws. It had blood on its coat. The dog belonged, as the neighbours knew, to a 35-year-old woman named Nicole Brown Simpson. She lived, with her two young children, in a Mediterranean-style condominium at 875 South Bundy Drive. She was the ex-wife of one of the most famous men in the United States: the retired football player and Hertz rental car spokesperson Orenthal James Simpson, known to everyone in America as O.J. The neighbours followed the dog back to Nicole Brown Simpson's home. What they found in the small, gated walkway leading up to her front door has become, in the 32 years since it was discovered, one of the most examined crime scenes in modern American history. Nicole Brown Simpson lay face down and barefoot at the bottom of the stone stairs leading to her front door. She had been stabbed multiple times. Her throat had been cut with such force that she had been very nearly decapitated. Approximately 15 feet away from her, in the small ornamental garden by the walkway's gate, lay the body of a second person. He was young, athletic, dark-haired. He was wearing jeans, boots, and a white shirt. He had been stabbed more than 30 times. His arms and hands bore extensive defensive wounds. He had, in the last minutes of his life, fought his attacker. His name was Ronald Lyle Goldman. He was 25 years old. He was a waiter at Mezzaluna, a nearby Brentwood restaurant where Nicole had eaten dinner with her family a few hours earlier. He had come to her door that evening to return a pair of eyeglasses her mother had left at the restaurant. He was, by every account of the people who had known him, an ordinary young man from an ordinary American family. He had made, on the last evening of his life, an ordinary kind gesture. The story of the trial that followed, watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Of the civil verdict that came two years later, which found what the criminal jury had not. Of the book, published in 2007, that is widely regarded as an effective confession. And of the death, in April 2024, of the man who had been at the centre of the case, without his ever having been criminally convicted of the killings.
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Shortly after midnight on the morning of Tuesday the 15th of November 1966, in the small Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the county of Mason, two young married couples in a black 1957 Chevrolet drove out along State Route 62 to see what there was to see at the abandoned munitions plant seven miles north of town. The plant had been decommissioned since the end of the Second World War. It was known, to everyone in Mason County, as the TNT Area. It consisted of several hundred acres of overgrown vegetation, crumbling concrete storage bunkers, and an abandoned power plant building. The four young people in the car were Roger Scarberry and his wife Linda, and Steve Mallette and his wife Mary. Roger was driving. It was a Monday night rolling over into a Tuesday morning. They had been out. On the drive back into town, they had decided to take the long way home, past the TNT Area. As they approached the abandoned power plant building at approximately five minutes past midnight, their headlights fell on what appeared to be two red points of light standing beside the road. Roger slowed the car. The four of them looked out through the windscreen. The two red points of light, they realised as they got closer, were not lights. They were eyes. The eyes belonged to a figure that was standing perfectly still at the side of the road, watching them. The figure was, in Roger Scarberry's later description to police, shaped like a man, but bigger. Approximately six or seven feet tall. It was covered in a dark grey substance that might have been feathers, or might have been skin, or might have been something else entirely. Behind its back, folded, were what appeared to be a pair of very large wings. For a moment, the four young people in the car sat and looked at it. Then the figure moved. The story of the 13 months that followed, in which more than 100 people across Mason County reported sightings of the same creature. Of the extraordinary investigation conducted by American paranormal researcher John Keel. Of the disturbing dreams that spread through Point Pleasant in the autumn of 1967. And of the terrible event that occurred, in the darkness of the early evening of Friday the 15th of December 1967, exactly 13 months and one day after the first sighting, that killed 46 people and, in a strange coincidence that has never been explained, ended the Mothman sightings entirely.
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At approximately 12:35 in the morning on Wednesday the 29th of April 2015, in a small clearing in the jungle of a prison island called Nusa Kambangan, off the southern coast of Central Java in Indonesia, a group of eight men and one woman stood in a line, facing a 13-member firing squad. Two of them were Australians. The younger of the two was 31 years old. His name was Andrew Chan. He had been born in Sydney to Chinese immigrant parents. He had, ten years earlier, at the age of 21, been the ringleader of an operation to smuggle 8.3 kilograms of heroin from the Indonesian island of Bali into Australia. The older was 34. His name was Myuran Sukumaran. He had been born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil refugees and had moved to Australia as a young child. He had, ten years earlier, at the age of 24, been Chan's co-ringleader in the same operation. He had, in a peculiar and unhappy coincidence of dates, been arrested on his 24th birthday. Twelve days after his 34th birthday, he was going to die. What no one who met them in the early days of their imprisonment could have predicted was what the two men would become in the ten years between their conviction and their execution. Andrew Chan would find Christianity, become a prison pastor, and lead the English-language church congregation of Kerobokan Prison in Bali. He would marry his fiancee in the prison chapel on the last night of his life. Myuran Sukumaran, under the mentorship of one of Australia's most celebrated contemporary artists, would become an accomplished painter, producing more than 100 works during his years in prison, and completing his final canvas, a painting of the Indonesian flag with red paint dripping down the canvas like blood, in the hours before he walked out to the firing squad. The story of two young Australians whose serious crime was, in the end, met with a punishment their country considered barbaric, of the seven other Australians who were arrested with them and who spent between 14 and 19 years in Indonesian prisons, of the Australian Federal Police's controversial decision to tip off Indonesian authorities knowing what the consequences would be, and of the extraordinary hymn that eight condemned prisoners sang together in the darkness of a jungle clearing at 12:35 in the morning on the 29th of April 2015.
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On the morning of Tuesday the 13th of December 2016, a video began to circulate on Mexican social media that would, within 48 hours, be seen by millions of people around the world. It had been recorded in the small town of San Miguel Totolapan, in the state of Guerrero, in the Tierra Caliente region of south-western Mexico. It showed a middle-aged woman speaking directly into the camera, in Spanish, with a controlled and quiet fury that no one who watched the video would ever forget. Her name was Yadira Guillermo García. Two days earlier, her husband, a local engineer named Isauro de Paz Duque, had been kidnapped by a cartel known as Los Tequileros, led by a man known as El Tequilero, the Tequila Drinker. The gang had terrorised the town for years. They had killed her neighbours. They had kidnapped her friends. They had ransomed her fellow citizens for money the community did not have. Yadira Guillermo García had not, in the two days that followed her husband's kidnapping, gone to the police. She had not gone to the state government. She had not gone to the federal authorities. She had, instead, done something no one in Guerrero had ever seen a kidnap victim's wife do before. She had raised the townspeople. She had led them into the streets. And with them, on the Monday morning after her husband was taken, she had helped detain approximately 20 people believed to be members and allies of Los Tequileros. Among them was El Tequilero's own mother. And when Yadira Guillermo García sat down in front of the camera the following morning and looked into the lens, she said to the cartel boss who had taken her husband: I have your mother here. I want an exchange. The story of one woman's extraordinary act of defiance against one of the most feared criminal organisations in southern Mexico, of the town that armed itself to fight back, and of the terrible price the community would eventually pay for its moment of resistance when the cartel returned, six years later, and slaughtered 20 people including the mayor.
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At approximately 11 o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 11th of October 1973, two men walked into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in the small Gulf Coast city of Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told the sheriff on duty that a few hours earlier, on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, they had been abducted by aliens. The older of the two men was Charles Hickson. He was 42 years old. He was a former military man. He was a shipyard fitter at the local Walker Shipyard. The younger was Calvin Parker. He was 19 years old. He was Hickson's co-worker. Neither of them, prior to that Thursday evening, had ever given a moment's thought to flying saucers. They had brought with them, to the sheriff's office, two catfish. They had, they explained, been fishing on the river when it happened. They had brought the catfish as evidence that the fishing part of their story, at least, was true. The sheriff, a man named Fred Diamond, listened to them describe a piercing sound in the air, blue lights on the water, an oval-shaped craft hovering silently at the edge of the river, and three creatures with grey folded skin, no visible eyes, and pincer-like claws for hands, who had paralysed them, floated them aboard the craft, and subjected them to a medical examination before returning them to the pier. Sheriff Diamond assumed, as any sheriff in Mississippi in 1973 would have assumed, that it was a hoax. He then, in the way that experienced law enforcement officers deal with suspected hoaxes, decided to test it. He put both men in an interview room. He ran a hidden tape recorder. He left them alone, expecting to catch them laughing. What he captured, on that tape, was two men, believing themselves to be unobserved, still absolutely terrified. Fifty-three years later, that tape has been recovered from a lost archive, listened to by researchers, and analysed alongside polygraph results, radiation testing, multiple corroborating witnesses, and the testimony of an American astronomer who had spent his career debunking UFO claims and who described this one, in careful language, as credible and deeply puzzling. The story of a night on the Pascagoula River in October 1973, of two ordinary men who reported an extraordinary experience, and of a mystery that has, in the 52 years since it happened, never been explained.
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